Those were the days

One remarkable thing was to be noticed in the early settlement here that those that came here with money had but little advantage over them who came here poor and without money, for it did not take long before those that came with money had it no more, and they all stood on the same footing, all poor and without money; those who lost it felt themselves poor, and those who came here without it soon felt themselves rich.

Historians say that the Wisconsin colony of Dutch Reformed people were neither as wealthy as the Scholte folks, who settled the Pella area, nor as poor as Van Raalte's west Michigan Hollanders. This particular memory was part of a long speech delivered by Peter J. Daane, one of the Wisconsin colony's leaders, on July 5, 1897, at the 50th anniversary of the Dutch settlement in southeast Wisconsin. Mr. Daane was town constable in its early years. He started a business in the Oostburg that grew up along the Sauk Trail, and then rolled the village on tamarack boughs, along with other businesses and families, when the railroad was laid another mile west of the lakeshore. For a time, he served in the state legislature.

He was the oldest child of a family who immigrated to the United States of America in the spring of 1842. He lived, with his family, in New York for five years before going west and carving an existence out of the Wisconsin shoreline woods. Along with his father and his brother, he served the Union Army, Company F, Twenty-seventh Wisconsin Regiment during the Civil War, entering as a private and leaving, in August of 1865 as a lieutenant.

There was no bedgrudging of one another, for it was a real pleasure to meet a neighbor, and to be able to assist each other to be able to lighten each other's burdens. Many of the remaining old settlers can testify with me that the time of the first settlement was the most pleasant time of their whole life, so sociable, so pleasant and all on an equal footing.

Is it simply nostalgia, you think?  Strangers in a strange land, people who left "the old country," never to return, people who came to America penniless, in search of opportunity, a new life, a following a dream at best and knowing little about the world they were about to inhabit--is it just nostalgia that those people would remember the earliest days in this new land and their shared poverty as "the most pleasant time of their lives"?

Passages in the fiction of Ruth Suckow sometime carry similar sentiments. In The John Wood Case, a new small town, still developing in the earliest years of the 20th century is frequently described as a place where simple joys grew in abundance from the dreams of  a community who shared in a vision of what would someday be in this new place.

Can't help but wonder, I guess. 

This morning I'm thankful for a speech delivered somewhere miles away, a speech my great-great grandfather heard. And when he did, I'm guessing, he was smiling to remember--smiling, just as I am.